The ASRock A75 BIOS and Overclocking Llano

Inside our First Llano BIOS

The good news about the AMD A-series platform launch is that it gives all the motherboard vendors an excuse to introduce UEFI for AMD. The ASRock board we were shipped for this review did in fact have a UEFI implementation on it and it seems relatively flexible. The only thing I saw missing right away were controls for overclocking the HD 6550D graphics.

Overclocking is done via a multiplier or a base bus speed: our defaults were 29x and 100 MHz. But, since all of the Llano APUs are expected to have locked CPU multipliers (you can still lower them though), you are limited to overclocking the system via the system bus and memory multipliers. Interestingly, overclocking the base clock not only pushes your CPU frequency and memory frequency (as we are used to) but also your GPU and north bridge frequency. So a base clock move from 100 MHz to 120 MHz would result in a CPU speed of 3.48 GHz and a GPU speed of 720 MHz.

You can adjust how much memory the HD 6550D is given for its work though it defaults to 256MB. I did try running some tests at 512MB and saw basically no performance improvements so the 256MB settings seems like the optimal one.

There are controls for the USB 2.0 and 3.0 controllers here.

System monitor and fan controls...

There plenty of voltage adjustments including those for DRAM, the CPU and the CPU north bridge functions. We were able to keep our DDR3 memory from Corsair at 1.65v for all of our testing without an issue.

Overclocking the AMD A-3850 APU

So the basics of overclocking Llano are pretty basic then: everything flows from the reference clock that defaults to 100 MHz. You can lower the CPU multiplier while pushing reference clock higher if you want to only overclock the memory and the GPU, or you can push the whole system at once if you would like.

AMD did give us this warning though: "Note that SATA and / or USB may run out of spec and you might see HDD detection issues etc if you push too far! This might vary between motherboard designs and some may be able to "lock" the SATA/USB clocks or use additional dividers. We have seen reports of 133MHz and even 148MHz ref. clock overclocking. This suggests that some boards likely have a divider that kicks in at 133MHz (i.e. 120MHz would likely fail but 133MHz might again work as the SATA/USB clocks return to safe values)."

What was I able to get out of the A8-3850 in my time with it?

Pretty surprisingly I was able to get a base clock of 130 MHz by pushing the CPU voltage up about 0.2v (be careful here!) and run stable. That gave us a CPU clock rate of 3.76 GHz and a GPU clock rate of 780 MHz. That isn't too bad for our first attempt with only a little trial and error!

We will be playing with these systems and different motherboards very soon to get more acquainted with the system and really push Llano to its limits.

That load power consumption doesn't look too good. Given that the GPU isn't active in a CPU-only test, one would have hoped that the power consumption doesn't approach the 100W TDP. That raises questions about Glofo's 32nm process.

Considering how little of a CPU the average user uses these days, integrating a CPU into a primarily GPU was a good choice. I would really like to see what the retailers(dell, HP, apple?) do with this chip. Especially if we see some sort of media powerhouse 1 chip Micro-ATX configurations. Right now that kind of field is dominated with some of the Atom type systems which are really lacking in the ability to handle media, if we see price drops in the llano line then it could push atom out of the super-compact media lineup.

Alternatively if it is adapted for mobile processors it could be a cheap solution to integrating discreet graphics on a full size laptop, however that 150W under load would eat a battery in no time.

Eh, that really is not an issue. The problem with going to a smaller process with these chipsets is really how many transistors they have and need. Now that we are seeing most of the northbridge functionality on CPUs, there is no real reason to shrink chipset logic. The problem that we start seeing is that these are already small chips, and if we shrink anymore without adding a bunch of extra features (and therefore transistor count), then we run into the problem of having enough pad space on the die for the substrate and pinouts. These chips also do not eat a whole lot of power at this time. Maybe 7 watts at max with two chips? It was different with the 790GX/890GX chips, as they were in the 15 watt range. But with the 990FX and SB950 both consuming between 5 and 7 watts combined... not a huge issue for a desktop application.

I like the new APU and i want it in some new Del laptops. Please keep a eye on this thanks. I dont like to over spend on any PC for it doing a basic job. thats watching vidio surfing and listting to audio and NO incodeing at all. yet i want to watch UTube and vidio content. I dont want any stutter and good audio. 6 ours batry life is fine 8 would be awsome. It has to have USB 3 ports + Thunderbolt. I think Thunderbalt is dead in the water if you have to buy the lead for 50$ too.

Hillarious. So many out of touch. Four cores to do meaneal tasks with actual GFX performance and power consumption that equalls the best. AMD will eat the competition despite reviewers being so removed from the reality of what box stores sales are comprised of. Of course Intel will just use its uber billions to advertise your need for "Intel" in the box, and discount its low end to compete.
Reviewers need to stop focusing on CPU performance when it comes to certain market segments. I have 10+ imidiate family members who could never figure out how to stress a modern CPU if they were offered $$$. But they get pissed in a second when they have crap multimedia. I have yet to hear anyone ever complain that their off the shelf just couldn't keep up with Office for them.
We are all past minimum performance being an issue. Get over it. This new AMD tech struggles in no area, yet the competition has constant issues with price or GFX capability in comparison.

Quote by reviewer: AMD Dual Graphics is a technology that I think has potential but lacks in some areas that I thought it needed to excel in. The fact that it doesn't support DX9 games completely confounds me and the response from AMD was built around the idea of "time commitments and value propositions." I don't see how DX9 titles, which are still FAR AND AWAY the majority of games out there right now, could not be worth the investment for gaming on the APU.

This is laughable, could not be worth investment for gaming on the APU? The I3 I5 or I7 with HD3000 CAN NOT play the DX9 games, the frame rates are to low. Not only that the image quality is less than video cards from 5 years ago. So which company is lacking an investment on DX9 games? Yes it would be nice to see dual graphics work on DX9 games but the fact is the AMD 6650D IGPU can play them just fine without dual graphics. Maybe you should also note that the HD3000/2000 do not support DX11.

While I don't do it, I know several "non gamer" types in my family who like listening to music while surfing the web. I know others do some downloading in the background while playing a game in windows mode so they can switch back and forth between the game and a chat window.

Weird (in my book), but it seems like there are a lot who do these kind of multi tasking things with their systems today.

Love the podcasts by the way. Though, the last couple have had video and audio sync problems (in case you didn't know).

In my MC guild, we rolled for gear because we the group was in fact an alliance of 2-3 little guilds operating collectively to create 40-mans achievable. Only merchandise I ever bought was my Pally bracers, a BOE... from the auction home.

As usual, a very well written article Ryan. I can tell you really spent a lot of time writing it, unfortunately not all the people commenting seem to care about the time you spent to both research the product as well as actually understand it.

My take on Llano is that they should have stuck to only launching it for "gaming notebooks." There was a toshiba on sale last week with the A8-3850 for $500 and that was the first time i saw an AMD notebook in a long time that actually seemed worth buying at a good price.

I also think a good market for Llano would be gaming nettops. A little Lan box that could play games decent, but nothing like a typical "gaming rig."

i think its good and im buying it next week along with hd6670...i seen few videos on you tube and im convinced its preety great considering price...so...its for ppl that need PC for new games like me and cant afford to give 2k $ for some beast of PC :) in cross with hd6670 it can play crysis 2 on average of 30-35 FPS so im contend with it :) thx for review :)

the APU trades memory bandwidth for more GPU performance; for a weak 64-bit DDR3 6450 it may mean +50% (unlikely), but for a full 256-bit GDDR5 6850 with lots of shaders it may even slow it down ... parallel processing has a cost, if it's added other bandwidth penalty it may be counter-productive ... so NO, you made a pretty bad choice if you miss the 1866 DDR3 support

I just installed an amd a8-3850 processor, and i was wondering what is the best discrete graphics card to use dual graphics with my cpu. i have been looking at the Visiontek 900485 Radeon HD 6670 Video Card.

I don't think that card will work in Crossfire X. I just got it today, and have spent literally hours trying to get it to Crossfire with A8-3850. I have all drivers installed and still cannot enable the Crossfire on AMD Vision Control Center. I am pretty savvy, but cannot figure it out. Diamond doesn't even list this card on their site anymore. Think they are running from this problem, instead of tackling it!

hey my bios doesnt have those options im running a laptop and i need to undervolt and overclock. can u shed some help? i may consider attempting e the fact flashing your bios over mine, despite the fact that ill most likely render my pc useless.

hey my bios doesnt have those options im running a laptop and i need to undervolt and overclock. can u shed some help? i may consider attempting e the fact flashing your bios over mine, despite the fact that ill most likely render my disfunctional. or do u have other suggestions etc etc?

just thought you would like to know, did some cusstomizations based upon my ELITE settings within my dell vostro core 2 duo westwood 1500 dell intel laptop, and i got this toshiba satellite 8100xlr8x to achieve stable all 4 cores at a 2464 Mhtz, the temparute gain without fan speed control is 1 c per second, the modification are thus:
volt rail 1 at 1.0063

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